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Dreadfully Inevitable

Bill Kristol must be joking: And even if Gingrich fades, let’s not assume it’s over. Bachmann and Santorum could still have a run in Iowa. If they continue to trail badly, it’s not out of the question that someone else could still present himself in mid-December to the citizens of Iowa (Hi there, Mike Huckabee! […]

Bill Kristol must be joking:

And even if Gingrich fades, let’s not assume it’s over. Bachmann and Santorum could still have a run in Iowa. If they continue to trail badly, it’s not out of the question that someone else could still present himself in mid-December to the citizens of Iowa (Hi there, Mike Huckabee! Hello, Sarah Palin!). Or, if Iowa (January 3), New Hampshire (January 10), and South Carolina (January 21) produce fragmented results, and the state of the race is disheartening to Republicans, a late January entry by another candidate isn’t out of the question, either [bold mine-DL]. Couldn’t Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio win the January 31 Florida primary as a write-in candidate in such circumstances?

Whatever happens, I imagine that Kristol will try to keep coming up with new and increasingly implausible scenarios in which Romney is defeated. The day after Romney accepts the nomination next summer, he’ll probably float the idea that it’s not to late to await the arrival of a time-travelling Marco Rubio sent back from 2021 to save us. According to the RCP averages for Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, Romney is in third, first, and second respectively, and he also has a narrow lead in Florida. Gingrich, his would-be rival of the week, has no campaign organization to speak of, and despite some recent improvement his fundraising to date has been abysmal. Romney might lose Iowa, but he could easily enough win all of the other January contests, and his organization in Iowa is still superior to anything his competitors have. If Romney can be defeated, I have not seen many persuasive arguments for how this would be done.

I’m not sure why Kristol keeps making these bizarre pronouncements about the 2012 field. Is he trying to pioneer new ways to be spectacularly wrong about things? If so, why stop with predicting late January entries into the presidential race? Why not March, or perhaps July?

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